Under a DACA amnesty, American taxpayers would be left with a $26 billion bill. About one in five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one in seven would go on Medicaid. Since DACA’s inception under Obama, more than 2,100 illegal aliens have been kicked off the program after it was revealed that they were either criminals or gang members. JOHN BINDER

Friday, February 19, 2016

MEXICAN CRIMINAL JUMPS AMERICA'S OPEN BORDERS OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN................ AND THEN MURDERS! - They would still like someone to explain how a man with De Luna's lengthy criminal history could be living illegally in the United States.

Two top immigration officials say stricter border control would slow illegal immigration

Just 3.5 percent of over 127,000 illegal youths arrested on
the U.S.-Mexico border over the last two and a half years have been
returned home, sparking Sen. Jeff Sessions to bark at a Senate hearing,
"Give me a break, who's running this country? Aren't we entitled to have
a system of laws?"

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing
on the topic of the two recent surges of minors across the U.S. border,
Sessions provided the new numbers: 127,193, apprehended over last two
and a half years and 4,680 returned. He later added, "97 percent of
unaccompanied minors evade deportation through administration
lawlessness."
The rest, said the Alabama senator, have either been placed with family and friends or are in the legal system.
Immigration has become a contentious issue on Capitol Hill and
on the campaign trail, with GOP front-runner Donald Trump pushing for
better border control.
On the Hill, Sessions and other administration critics claim
that by letting in so many illegal immigrants, especially youths, the
message to those in Central America is that the United States has an
open door policy.
Sessions believes that if a majority of those trying to enter
illegally were sent back, the message would be don't try to cross the
border, and two different administration officials said a tougher border
policy would likely limit illegal crossings.
"I don't disagree with that," said Thomas Homan, executive
associate director for enforcement and removal operations with the U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
He added, "I think that if you have a consequence and deterrence to illegal activity the illegal activity will slow down."
Ronald Vitiello, deputy chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, added, "Yes, I believe that matters."
Sessions hit president for looking on every unaccompanied illegal minor as a victim of crime back home, and eligible for asylum.
"If caught, they should be treated fairly and sent home," said
Sessions. But, he added, "it cannot be that every young person that
appears from Central America is entitled to asylum or entry into the
United States contrary to our laws. It just cannot be. Does anybody in
this government not understand that? That's what people are upset
about."
Democrats approached the issue differently, backing the
president's open door policy and calling for more legal and social aid
for the children.
Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, for example, said that those given
legal help typically have a better chance of getting asylum. He said
that 73 percent of those provided lawyers got to stay in the country.
Issues of sex abuse and forced labor involving the illegal
minors was also raised, and officials could not rule out that there has
been abuse.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at

HALF THE MURDERS IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED MEXIFORNIA ARE NOW BY MEX GANGS!

90% OF ALL MURDERS IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES ARE BY MEXICANS!

Accused Laredo Killer Easily Shuttled Over Border

Angie Martinez, a 27-year-old mother of
three, was killed in Laredo in 2015. Her estranged husband, an
undocumented immigrant, is charged with her murder.

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LAREDO – The sirens, the crime-scene tape, the tears and agony
belonged on the television screen in Martha Martinez’s living room.
Some of her favorite evenings were spent there with her sister
Angelica — Angie, her siblings called her — watching "The First 48," a
reality television show on which investigators scramble to solve murders
within two days or risk the crimes going unsolved.
The sisters were “open diaries,” Martha Martinez recalled recently, best friends who kept tabs on each other daily.
In 2015, Angie Martinez had turned a corner at age 27. After earning
her degree in criminal justice, she'd landed a steady job at the Webb
County Jail. But more importantly, as far as her sisters were concerned,
Angie had gained some independence and confidence. She had separated
from her husband, Juan Francisco De Luna Vasquez, an undocumented
immigrant from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, this Texas town’s sister city
just across the Rio Grande.
“He used to control her so much — a lot,” Martha Martinez said. “She
started to defend herself. But their lives were always very
complicated.”

On the evening of July 2, Martha Martinez’s phone calls to Angie’s
cell phone went unanswered. An hour later, she saw flashing police
lights up close. Angelica Martinez had stopped by the central Laredo
apartment she previously shared with De Luna to pick up their three
children, ages nine, eight and three.
The kids were ordered outside and warned not to come back into the
apartment, Martha Martinez recounted. Moments later the children said
they heard their mother scream, and their father quickly packed them in
his car and delivered them to a relative’s house.
Angie Martinez was found inside the apartment bludgeoned to death.
“When I got there, they wouldn’t let me go up, and that’s when a
police officer told me that she had passed away,” said Martha Martinez,
who drove to the scene after her mom told her Angie hadn’t shown up like
she was supposed to. “And I had told him ‘No, it’s not her. She
wouldn’t give up that easily.’”
Any hopes that her sister was still clinging to life were dashed when
Martha realized there was no ambulance among the flashing lights. “I
remember telling him to give her CPR, to call an ambulance. [I said,]
‘There’s no ambulance here – you need to call somebody.’ But she was
already dead,” Martha Martinez recalled.
De Luna allegedly bashed in the side of Angie's head and strangled
her, according to Laredo police. Beside her body they found a
hand-written confession from De Luna, who was caught after he allegedly
tried to commit suicide in an upper-middle class neighborhood where
Martha Martinez said De Luna used to work as a handyman. He is now
awaiting trial for the murder.Martha and her older sister Kimberly
Martinez don’t need TV cops to help solve the mystery of who killed
their sister. They would still like someone to explain how a man with De
Luna's lengthy criminal history could be living illegally in the United
States.
By the time he was arrested in July 2015 for the Martinez murder, De
Luna had been through the Webb County Jail at least four times on a
half-dozen charges, according to Webb County Sheriff’s Department
records. He had been caught illegally crossing the border under
different aliases and sent back to Mexico four times, according to a
statement the Department of Homeland Security issued after his murder
arrest.

But it is unclear if federal immigration authorities were told about
all of De Luna's crimes or whether any effort was made to detect his
return to the United States.De Luna was first arrested in January 2006, on an assault charge.
That charge was dismissed, and De Luna was deported to Mexico later
that month. In late June, the U.S. Border Patrol caught De Luna trying
to come back in, and he was charged with improper entry by an alien,
according to federal court documents.But less than a week later, Webb County records show he was again
picked up and charged with evading arrest, resisting arrest and making
terroristic threats. Those charges were still pending when Angie
Martinez was killed.

On July 3, 2006, a federal magistrate convicted De Luna of improper
entry and ordered him deported and placed on unsupervised probation for
three years. He was also ordered to pay a $10 fine, and he served no
time in prison.
In 2010, De Luna was arrested after a warrant was issued for failing
to show up to court on his earlier charges, according to Webb County
Jail records. But he was out on the streets soon after.
Despite De Luna's arrest record, it’s unclear if federal authorities
used any tools at their disposal — including prison time or threats of
penalties — to delay or thwart De Luna’s repeated returns to Texas.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement referred all inquiries about
federal interactions with De Luna to the U.S. Border Patrol. Agents with
the U.S. Border Patrol's Laredo Sector said there is no record their
office ever came across De Luna. A senior official for U.S. Customs and
Border Protection’s public affairs office in Washington said the agency
doesn’t release details about some deportees due to privacy concerns.
De Luna lived in Laredo enjoying his “fresa” lifestyle — a border
term for Mexican socialites who enjoy, and often demand, the finer
things society has to offer no matter their social standing, Martha and
Kimberly Martinez said. His arrest history prevented him from gaining
legal status but didn’t seem to affect his ability to live in Texas,
working as a maintenance technician and handyman in the neighborhood
where he was caught.
A few weeks before Thanksgiving 2013, De Luna was arrested again and
charged with DWI and striking an object on a highway. With his previous
assault and evading arrest charges still pending, he was booked into
Webb County Jail for the fourth time. But he was soon on Texas streets
again, bonding out the same day he was arrested after posting $2,500.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement hasn’t responded to several requests
asking if the agency took any actions to have De Luna transferred into
their custody before he was released.
Armando Martinez, Angie’s father, said De Luna's 2013 arrest should
have been the last straw for a “born criminal.” Had De Luna been locked
up, or deported, his daughter might still be alive.

Juan Francisco De Luna Vasquez is charged with the 2015 murder of his estranged wife.

“Why didn’t the police or immigration go get him at his house?” he
asked. “I never called the cops on him because I wanted to protect my
daughter. But they should have gotten him. He’s nothing but a bandido.”
Angie Martinez was murdered in Laredo the day after a homeless
undocumented immigrant in San Francisco allegedly shot and killed Kate
Steinle. Steinle's death provoked national outrage, and state lawmakers
often use it to highlight what they call the Obama administration’s
“recklessness.” But no one at the state Capitol mentioned the Martinez
case during interim committee hearings on border security.
The sisters aren’t sure why, but say it doesn’t seem to matter.
They’re grappling with their own feelings about immigration — something
they say they never really thought heavily about until their sister was
killed.
“There’s a lot of illegal people here, right? But sometimes you come
back because you need to work,” Martha said. “But what he did and how he
lived his life, it does make you angry because he got in a lot of
trouble with the law.”
Despite his confession, De Luna’s case remains pending in a Webb
County court. During a court appearance Jan. 8, a judge set his trial
date for May. Eduardo Peña, his court-appointed attorney, said his
client’s guilt isn’t in doubt.
Cases like De Luna’s prove the border isn’t as sealed as some say.
After being arrested, it’s only a matter of time before dangerous
immigrants are back in Texas, Peña said.
“[Undocumented immigrants] are sometimes just given time served. It’s
a merry go round,” he said. “Some are back in a day or two. It’s
definitely a problem. It’s a race to post bond before ICE can detain
them. There’s no question the border isn’t properly secured.”
It’s Peña's job to convince a jury the killing wasn’t premeditated
but “a crime of passion” that could win De Luna a lesser sentence.
That would be a living nightmare for the Martinez family.
“After all the evidence and the autopsy, it’s more then enough to
find him guilty and for him not to ever, ever come out. She didn’t
deserve to die that way,” Martha said.

Texas Sheriffs, Jails on Immigration Front Line

The badge of Captain Jaime Magaña in Webb County Jail in Laredo, TX, on Nov. 5, 2015. Photo by Martin do Nascimento

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*Correction appendedWith a $6 billion budget and more than 20,000 employees, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stands poised to seize and deport immigrants — undocumented or not — who commit serious crimes in the United States.Provided someone else catches them.

The behemoth agency at the center of the nation’s immigration
enforcement efforts has no proactive way — watch lists, data mining or
the like — to systematically search for dangerous undocumented
immigrants, including those who have returned to the United States after
being deported for committing crimes.

Instead, if an immigrant criminal is caught and thrown out of the
country, the process most likely begins when a local police officer or
sheriff's deputy pulls them over for a traffic stop or arrests them as
part of a criminal investigation.

The success of federal deportation policy in Texas and nationwide
depends for the most part on a heads up from county sheriffs. They run
the jails where people are taken when arrested and where the culling of criminal immigrants begins.

Being at the bottom of the enforcement pyramid places tremendous
pressure on them — political, legal and otherwise — sheriffs say, and
with federal policy increasingly targeting serious, repeat criminal
offenders, their role in the process has grown.

“When some of these sheriffs talk about bringing in an undocumented,
it may be one a month,” said Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez. “With
us, it’s several a day.”

The legal tool federal authorities use to take custody of immigrants they want is the detainer.
Around in some form or fashion since the 1950s, detainers are notices
sent to jails asking them to hold on to an immigrant once local
authorities are done with them so federal agents can come by and get
them.
In its latest incarnation,
the detainer is reserved for the most serious convicted immigrant
criminals. This new, narrower restriction, imposed in November 2014, has
caused the number of detainers to drop. As of October 2015, the latest monthly figure available, 7,117 detainers were issued. That's down from an all-time monthly high of 27,755 in August 2011, according to voluminous Freedom of Information Act requests made by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Texas is central to the federal agency’s deportation
efforts. Nationwide, only eight jails received more than 1,000 detainer
requests in the last year, according to clearinghouse data. Four were in
Texas — Harris, Travis, Dallas and Hidalgo counties.

A report
last year on the federal agency’s enforcement operations shows it
plucked 139,368 people from the nation's jails and prisons during the
fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2015. That accounted for about 59 percent
of the total number of people ICE removed from the country that year for
a variety of reasons.

Many came from Texas, screened out of state prisons or found among
the approximately 71,000 people who are booked into local Texas jails
each month, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. On
average, 3,724 undocumented immigrants were detained in Texas jails each
month in 2015, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of immigration
detainer reports from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

Between December 2012 and October 2015, undocumented immigrants who
sat in Texas county jails cost taxpayers a total of $210.6 million,
according to reports filed with the Texas Commission on Jail Standards
that were released to The Texas Tribune.

In 2015, the federal government provided about $12 million
to Texas to care for incarcerated undocumented immigrants. Most of that
- more than $8 million - went to the Texas prison system, not jails.

Yet for all the statistics, no federal, state or local agency can
claim it has a handle on the number of "criminal aliens" — the
government's term for foreigners who commit crimes in the U.S. — who are
currently in the country, how many crimes they are responsible for and
what share the system catches.

Local options
In Harris, the state’s most populous county, 135,000 inmates each year come through the jailhouse doors. It and the city of Carrollton are the only two
Texas jurisdictions that contract with the federal government to have
immigration agents stationed at its jail helping pinpoint criminal
immigrants. Nine federal officers and nine Harris County deputies
schooled in federal procedures comb booking documents and interview
inmates suspected of being in the country illegally.

By contrast, in Brewster County, the state's geographically largest —
as in, bigger than some states — things work a bit differently. About
9,200 people live in the West Texas county, and its jail in Alpine has
no official policy for handling undocumented immigrants.
How does it strive to alert federal authorities when a criminal
immigrant is arrested? “We’ve got a sign on the wall,” jail
administrator Lora Nussbaum told the Tribune, referring to a torn ICE
flier taped on a jail wall that lists the agency's phone number.
County jails may be the front line of efforts to keep undocumented
immigrants who commit serious crimes from slipping through the cracks,
but the state of Texas has no uniform method of going about that task,
or measuring the scope of the problem.
To gain a better picture of crimes committed by undocumented
immigrants and how counties handle them, the Tribune asked for booking
data and immigration procedure policies from 26 Texas counties,
including the state’s 10 most populous.
Almost none would provide it. Some, like Montgomery and Presidio
counties, insisted that providing booking information, including an
inmate’s date of birth, violated the inmate’s right to privacy. Harris
County claimed that releasing a list of noncitizens was essentially
creating new information — something the Texas Public Information Act
does not require a governmental body to do.
Some counties argued that that federal law specifically prohibits releasing information about immigrants.
Attorney General Ken Paxton's office upheld most of the counties’ arguments, saying state open records laws don't compel release of the information.
The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office went a step further and insisted
that booking records are court records and, as such, are not subject to
the state’s open records law. The attorney general’s office agreed,
blocking their release.
Five counties responded to the Tribune’s request for booking data:
Brewster, Nueces, Fort Bend, Travis and Tarrant. Of those, only Travis
responded with enough detailed information to analyze.

“We don’t want to be in a position where somebody loses their life because of something we didn’t do that was legal for us to do.”— Maj. Wes Priddy, chief administrator for Travis County jails

The numbers show that Travis County booked about 20,000 inmates with
federal immigration detainers between 2008 and 2015, facing charges that
were roughly evenly divided between felonies and misdemeanors. More
than 7,000 of those inmates faced drunk driving charges, the most common
charge by far. That was followed by family violence-related assault
charges, which about 1,900 inmates faced. An estimated 2,400 of the
total inmates were repeat offenders.

Maj. Wes Priddy, chief administrator for Travis County jails, said
local law enforcement’s primary concern was public safety, not
investigating immigration status. But he said that part of keeping
dangerous people off the streets involved close cooperation with federal
authorities.

“We don’t want to be in a position where somebody loses their life
because of something we didn’t do that was legal for us to do,” Priddy
said.

After arresting someone, the Department of Public Safety, county
sheriffs, and even the Texas Department of Criminal Justice — the
nation’s largest prison system — all have to rely on the federal
government to inform them who is in the United States illegally.

“What our obligation is, is to provide ICE with the population
information,” said Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson. “They go through
it. They determine who they’re going to put a hold on and who they’re
not, and our people don’t really have a way to further investigate are
they truly here legally or not.”

That typically happens during the booking process, when a suspect’s
fingerprints are sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a
procedure used for every new inmate. If the fingerprints match a profile
in the federal database of non-U.S. citizens with previous criminal
histories, ICE can decide to ask for a detainer. Texas jail officers do
ask arrestees to name their country of birth as a part of the booking
process, but an arrested immigrant’s answer is written down without
being verified.

The same holds true for inmates in Texas prison. As of Nov. 30, 2015,
three-fourths of the 9,135 inmates in the Texas prison system with ICE
detainers were in the United States illegally. The remainder include
those serving time for crimes who had legal immigration status.

“Ultimately, ICE will make the determination whether that person is
in country illegally,” said Texas prisons spokesman Jason Clark. In
2010, the agency began asking for ICE help verifying those among the
system’s 148,000 inmates who were illegally in the country.

But the federal tracking system of verifying what law enforcement
refers to as “criminal aliens” is less than precise. It relies on
someone's fingerprints being in the system because they have been
arrested before. If an undocumented immigrant has never encountered law
enforcement, the federal tracking system might not notice their first
arrest.

Jumbled numbers

There is no definitive data showing that undocumented immigrants
commit crimes at a higher rate than the citizen population, and a few
indications that in Texas they do not.

The Pew Research Center estimates undocumented immigrants comprise about seven percent of the Texas population. On average, 3,724 undocumented
immigrants were detained in Texas jails each month in 2015, according
to a Texas Tribune analysis of immigration detainer reports from the
Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

Of the 148,000 inmates held in 100 Texas prison units, about 9,135
inmates have federal detainers asking that they be handed to federal
officials when their sentences are complete. Not all were in the country
illegally when arrested. Those that were illegal account for about 4.6
percent of the prison population.

Nationwide, almost 60 percent of immigrants who are deported had some
previous criminal charges, according to 2015 numbers from ICE.

A group of undocumented Mexican nationals who
were convicted of crimes in the U.S. enter Mexico at the US-Mexico
border crossing at Brownsville/Matamoros after being deported from the
United States on Nov 4, 2015.

The Pew Center, relying on 2012 U.S. Census numbers, estimated that
Texas has 1.7 million undocumented immigrants, ranking second in the
nation. What portion of that 1.7 million is responsible for crimes is a
tougher calculus.

Estimates from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which gets the
information from jails, are considered inaccurate because there’s no
uniform requirement to verify citizenship during the jail booking
process.

In 2014, then-Gov. Rick Perry was
criticized for relying on DPS’ first attempts to calculate the impact
of crimes committed by immigrants. That year, Perry repeated the
department's claim that “criminal aliens” had committed more than
642,000 crimes in Texas since 2008. It was later revealed
that “criminal aliens” referred to all foreign-born immigrants in
Texas, not just those in the state illegally, and the "crimes" counted
included charges, not convictions, some dating back decades.
One year later, DPS tried to clarify the numbers, but even director
Steve McCraw, appearing before the Texas House Committee on State
Affairs in December, tried to lower expectations about the “criminal
alien statistic” his agency featured on its website.

“It’s an undercount,” McCraw testified on Dec 10. “We acknowledge it
woefully undercounts the amount, but it does accurately count the ones
who are in fact here and the ones who have committed crimes.”

The DPS statistics continue to confuse both the public and lawmakers.

ICE officials consider a foreign national — here legally or otherwise
— a "criminal alien" if they've been convicted of a crime. DPS broadens
the definition to include foreign nationals who have only been
arrested.

“Criminal alien is a foreign national with a criminal record,"
explained DPS Assistant Director Skylor Hearn, who oversees the agency’s
law enforcement support division, which includes the state's crime
records. “There was probable cause to arrest them for something, and it
would apply to the rest of us as well, generally speaking. If you’ve
been arrested, you have a criminal record; you are not a criminal, but
you have a criminal record.”

By DPS's count, 177,060 foreign-born individuals were charged with
crimes from 2011 through Jan. 31. That's a much larger number than those
foreign nationals actually convicted during the same time frame in
Texas: 84,182 non-U.S. citizens. Of those, 58,128 were determined to be
in the United States unlawfully.

State Rep. Cesar Blanco, D-El Paso, says the DPS numbers on "criminal
aliens" are artificially pumped up by counting the number of criminal
charges filed against undocumented immigrants instead of actual
convictions. Charges are routinely dismissed for lack of evidence or
other reasons, he noted.

But by hyping the number of charges, the agency bolsters the argument
for more border security money. Last year, the Texas Legislature
approved an additional $800 million for border security.
"When crime rates were higher in this state, did the legislature move this much money?" Blanco asked.

Adding to the mathematical
murkiness, immigration status can be fluid. A foreign-born Texas jail
inmate could be legally in the country at the time of one arrest but
have an expired visa by the next arrest and be undocumented the second
time around, further bedeviling Texas’ attempts at measuring
unauthorized immigrants’ impact on the state’s criminal justice system.

Attempts by DPS to connect criminal aliens to their crimes also fall short.

The agency's data, obtained by the Tribune, shows that 177,060 non-U.S. citizens arrested from 2011 through Jan. 31 were charged with252,083 offenses during that time. This is less than what DPS reports on its own website becausethe agencycounts crimes committed over a U.S. citizen's lifetime, outside the five-year span.

DPS officials insist that its
criminal alien counts, based on federal immigration data, are not an
attempt to construe that foreign-born criminals are a greater threat
than U.S. citizens.

“The department has not made that statement and does not have
information to support that statement,” DPS spokeswoman Summer Blackwell
said in a statement. “The Department of Public Safety believes any
individual who has committed a violent crime or is party to criminal
activities — no matter their citizenship status or country of origin —
is considered a potential threat to public safety and the security of
Texas.”

The arrest of an undocumented immigrant in the U.S. kicks off a complicated interplay between local and federal authorities.

Just say no
Even when federal immigration authorities decide they want to take
immigrants from the state criminal justice system into custody, there
can be obstacles.

Federal records obtained by the Tribune show that in more than 18,000
cases over the past two years, local jails across the country failed to
hand over deportable immigrants to federal authorities. Jurisdictions
in many states, including Pennsylvania, California and Colorado, have
become reluctant to honor the detainers after facing a series of lawsuits from inmates challenging the constitutional legitimacy of the extended detention.

Further information about the outcomes in cases where local officials
declined to detain someone — whether those inmates, many with previous
criminal histories, had been released to the public — proved difficult
to come by, even in Texas, where there were only 146 such cases.

Of the 11 state jails contacted by the Tribune, only one could
provide definitive answers about what had happened with declined
detainers in its jurisdiction.

In Collin County north of Dallas, where agency records show two
declined detainers, one for an inmate with a criminal history, a
spokesman for the sheriff’s office said it “would literally be too
manpower-intensive and potentially impossible to locate the reasons they
were released.”

The Texas county with the most declined detainers — Travis, which had
72 instances, including 33 on inmates with a prior criminal history —
referred all questions about the records to the federal government.

“I do not know how ICE came up with those numbers and we do not keep
stats for ICE,” Travis County Sheriff’s office spokesman Roger Wade said
in an email. “You will have to ask ICE how they arrived at those
numbers and what their definition is of declining detainers.”

The federal agency itself could not verify further details about the
cases. An ICE official, who lacked authorization to comment and thus
spoke on condition of anonymity, said a small number of the cases could
be a result of administrative errors at the federal or local level.
But beyond that, the official said it would be “resource-prohibitive”
to determine what exactly happened in the individual circumstances.
Step away from the direct cost to jails to house undocumented
immigrants — and the troubling lack of standardized record keeping — and
there’s the added pressure of keeping up with the federal government’s
ever-shifting parameters of who in local jails is eligible for
deportation.
On Nov. 20, 2014,
ICE’s parent, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, discontinued a
policy known as Secure Communities in favor of a new plan called the
Priority Enforcement Program. Secure Communities — which targeted anyone
in the United States illegally — had faced fierce pushback from local
officials across the country who feared legal liability under the
program.
With the new program, the federal agency decided to focus its
deportation efforts on undocumented immigrants who committed the most
serious crimes.
In congressional testimony and internal documents detailing the new
policy’s implementation, ICE officials have stressed the importance of
local cooperation. A 2015 memo from the federal immigration agency
describes “expansive efforts to encourage state and local law
enforcement partners” to collaborate with the agency.
The program was developed to “bring back on board those state and
local jurisdictions that had concerns with, or legal obstacles to,
assisting us,” said ICE Director Sarah Saldaña in July testimony before a
congressional committee.
But the federal agency has opposed requiring local authorities to
honor immigration detainers. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson
told members of the House Judiciary Committee in July that it would a
“huge setback” to mandate compliance with immigration policy.
“I do not believe that mandating through federal legislation the
conduct of sheriffs and police chiefs is the way to go,” he said. “I
think it will be hugely controversial. I think it will have problems
with the Constitution. I want to see us work cooperatively with state
and local law enforcement, and I believe they are poised to do that.”
The voluntary guidelines from federal authorities can leave local
officials in a politically precarious position — often, no matter what
decision they make will land them in hot water.
Jurisdictions in Democratically controlled urban areas face intense
pressure from activists critical of federal immigration policy to cease
any cooperation with ICE.
“Our ideal situation would be for there to be no ICE collaboration
whatsoever,” said Carolina Canizales, the San Antonio-based deportation
defense director of United We Dream, a national immigrant rights
organization, which regularly stages protests at jails in the state, in
an October interview. “I think they shouldn’t condemn thousands of
undocumented immigrants for one crime that has been committed.”
At the same time, state lawmakers are on the watch for any sign that
county sheriffs are failing to hold unauthorized immigrants singled out
by ICE for deportation until federal ICE officers can pick them up and
return them to their home country.
Take the case of Dallas County Sheriff Valdez, who throughout her
time in office has most often found herself in the crosshairs of
immigrant rights activists. She currently faces a lawsuit alleging her
jail has held immigrants for unconstitutionally long periods of time
even after they received bond.
But recently, she has become better known for the harsh public denunciation she received from Gov. Greg Abbott,
who wrote her a letter saying that what he viewed as lacking
enforcement of federal immigration policy posed a “serious danger to
Texans.”
Abbott’s letter came after Valdez told reporters in October she would
review federal detainers placed on inmates in her jail on a
case-by-case basis and would not hold immigrants arrested for minor
crimes for up to 48 hours for ICE officers.
Her comments seemed to mirror ICE’s changed focus on the most serious
immigrant criminals — but before she had a chance to clarify, Abbott
blasted her stance and threatened to cut off grants to any sheriff’s
office choosing to not abide by federal immigration detainers.
Valdez said late last year that her statement was taken out of context.
“What I said was, when there’s a disagreement (over whether a jail
inmate was undocumented or not) we look at it case-by-case,” Valdez told
the Tribune in December. “But in this whole time we haven’t had a
disagreement ... The feds and I are great. ICE and I are fine.”Becca Aaronson contributed data analysis and reporting to this story.Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated
the percentage of the Texas prison population that is undocumented. The
correct number is 4.6 percent.